I wasn’t going to blog about NaNoWriMo (which should be called InNoWriMo) again this year, but I’m a writer and it turns out to be one of the job requirements. My main blog (if you’re reading this on LJ or DW) has a search function so you can check out actual advice from earlier years, if you’re curious. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s a plan to write 50K of a novel in the month of November: (Inter)National Novel Writing Month)

In earlier years, I’ve said that I think November is a terrible month for NaNoWriMo. In the U.S., Thanksgiving falls right at the end of the month, and Giftmas planning comes right after. If you’re barely keeping to your daily goals, those big holiday events along with friend/family obligations, can be a deal-breaker.

As CC Finlay pointed out on Twitter, that’s part of the challenge. You’re supposed to make your goal despite increased demands on your time.

To me, though, it seems like an attempt to make writers give up at the last minute, like mapping out a marathon that ends on a long, steep hill, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought it was a fine thing. The thing is, you can work like crazy on a book, fail to meet some arbitrary word count goal, and still succeed beyond your wildest because the draft is pretty good.

It’s good to strive and fail. It’s good to strive and fail at something that is only of peripheral importance (such as the number of words written in a month) if it leaves you with a solid draft.

Sure, there will be plenty of people claiming to “win” NaNoWriMo because they hit the 50K mark. Hell some will declare victory in the first week. Those people don’t matter. All that matters is what you create. And you can’t really call it a failure if the end of November comes and you’ve only written 40K, or 20K, or even 10k words. Just do what you can do, aim for the word count goal if that seems like an opportunity to stretch, and have fun.

Also:

There I was, the first Libertarian President of bark bark damn it mom the dog stays outside this is my speech-to-text time #NaNoWriMoOpeners